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rovsuite / monterey

Monterey is the computer GUI for rov-suite, an open source ROV control system.
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"Gears" for motor speed #66

Open olegodo opened 10 years ago

olegodo commented 10 years ago

It would be really nice and maybe even necessary to have some sort of "gears" for the motors. Example. Setting/Gear 1: motor power from 0% to 25% Setting/Gear 2: motor power from 0% to 50% Setting/Gear 3: motor power from 0% to 75% Setting/Gear 4: motor power from 0% to 100%

chriskonstad commented 10 years ago

Right now there is something similar, but a little different. Instead of having user switchable gears, the joystick axes are read bilinearly, not linearly. This means that the motor value changes start off small while the stick is near the center and they increase more as the stick moves further out. It's like a psuedo-quadratic curve. You can adjust a constant in the settings which will change how much it effects the joystick axis values. The benefit of doing bilinear reading over gears is that, if configured properly, bilinear reading should feel more natural. That being said, bilinear reading doesn't give you the same amount of precision that gears could give you.

Does bilinear reading sound like what you were thinking of or are gears still needed?

olegodo commented 10 years ago

Hmm, I really think it would be a great feature. So far, I have only tested controlling one motor with an xbox 360 controller through Monterey 3.0 on my bench. And it seemed a little touchy and required precision input to control the speed of the motor gradually.

What I imagine is that if you are maneuvering close to something, and you need to change direction of the ROV suddenly, it's easy to overdo it as it is now. However, this might be completely different once the ROV is in the water and inertia is taken in to account. The mass of the ROV will have a lot to say here. I know the OpenROV has these gears, but also, that ROV is quite small and light.

chriskonstad commented 10 years ago

Okay. Since the bilinear reading is too touchy I'll add the gears option. Thanks for the feedback!

chriskonstad commented 10 years ago

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chriskonstad commented 10 years ago

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chriskonstad commented 10 years ago

I still need to add a way for the joystick to increase/decrease the gear. I'll work on that soon.